Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679) at 425
[Karel Porteman]

...but what is in my heart

Wells up towards my lips; the inward pressure grows:

Fermenting like new wine, it bursts and overflows

Curry-Comb, 64-66

‘La langue de Vondel’ - one occasionally still reads it in the French-language press as an alternative to ‘Flemish’ or ‘Dutch’. In the nineteenth century such ‘literary’ language designations were commonplace, but the formulation has little substance today: the once flourishing Dutch Vondel tradition belongs to the past. Those participating in the 1987 commemoration - predominantly academics - admitted as much. Yet their attitude was not totally one of gloom and doom. Vondel was dead, so long live Vondel! By which they simply meant that what had been forgotten could be rediscovered. Freeing the poet from his own monumental shadow and the many ideological bonds by which he had for so long been shackled, would, they hoped, lead to a renewed and intensified literary-historical encounter. It seemed as if the claim that almost every Dutch political and ideological grouping had laid to Vondel, was now the exclusive right of literary historiography, the focus of whose inquiry would be on the poet as a figure from the past: what his work was like, what his intention was in writing it, what it meant and why people found it so wonderful. ‘Vondel is a historical figure and only as such does he form part of culture,’ wrote the authoritative journal Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde in its commemorative issue.

We are now a quarter of a century and a new commemoration further on. Is the tide turning? In the current craze for historical rankings, which has not spared the Low Countries, Vondel has fared well. If in the list of the Greatest Dutchmen he ranks only (or, if you prefer, still) 53rd, in the Dutch literary canon, voted on in 2002 by the approximately 1,600 members (literary specialists, linguists and historians) of the venerable Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde (Society of Dutch Literature, 1776!), he still occupies second place (after Multatuli). At the same time he is top of the list of unjustly forgotten writers. Productions of his plays remain rare, but when they are performed they still provoke comment. From the 1980s on they were virtually the exclusive province of Vondel's passionate advocate Hans Croiset, often with splendid results. This director was one of the co-founders of the Amsterdam company Het toneel speelt (Stage Play, 1996), which specialises in literary theatre and in the past few years has revived the tradition, begun in 1641 but discontinued in 1968, of performing Vondel's Gysbreght van Aemstel (1637) every New Year's Day. This tragedy, which dramatises the siege and fall of Amsterdam in 1304 in

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Vondel aged 70 (1657), engraving by Cornelis de Visscher from his own drawing. The translation of the Latin inscription is: What Virgil's trumpet, Horace's lyre, Seneca's high buskin and Juvenal's salt wit was to the Romans, Vondel is to the Dutch, when he, vying with all in talent, opens his gifted mouth as the pinnacle of art.

‘Trojan style’, had, like Rembrandt's Nightwatch, almost become a national icon. It had all the ingredients: shocking changes of fortune for brave forefathers, emotional dialogues and blood-curdling narratives, supremely lyrical choruses and the sense of Amsterdam patriotism that was particularly intense in the Golden Age. Cultured Dutch people can still quote the Christmas and marriage choruses without stumbling. A film version announced a few years ago has still to materialise. There has also been an increase in the number of - sometimes very radical - adaptations of Vondel plays or cases of creative rewriting. On the other hand stage critics - often through laziness - continue to express their dislike of their obsolete language and themes.

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The actor Willem Ruyter dressed as Bishop Gozewijn for a performance of Gysbreght van Aemstel. Drawing by Rembrandt in the wings of the Amsterdam Theatre (Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen).

If older literature has been forced onto the defensive in secondary education, contemporary academic Vondel studies present a more hopeful picture. Slowly and accompanied by sometimes heated debates, interpretations are gaining ground that offer a reading of Vondel (mainly his plays) based on new approaches employed by contemporary literary studies which had rarely if ever been applied to canonical authors in Dutch literary history - such as deconstruction, discourse theory and new historicism. Vondel's work, we are now told, is not buried in his own age, but exists in the present and should be the subject of a wide variety of reading strategies. The standard-bearer of this approach is the Leiden professor Frans-Willem Korsten, who uses contemporary perspectives to demonstrate how Vondel's ‘polyphonic’ plays deal with ‘sovereignty’ and violence. He reads them as intellectual expressions of political theory that weigh the sovereignty of a natural order positively against the power-based order imposed by God. The fact that in this Korsten virtually always goes beyond the framework of interpretations based on the ‘historical’ Vondel and the explicit discourse with which the writer positioned his dramas in the so-called ‘Berechten’ (introductions) to his work, provoked much criticism. On the other hand, these extremely provocative analyses, which are now also available in English (see reading list), have reawakened interest and made the academic world at large aware that Vondel is a great and interesting poet who is still worth studying today. Korsten sees the dramas as ‘politically charged, aes-

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Title page print of Vondel's Lucifer (1654), probably engraved by S. Savry. Michael strikes down Lucifer with a lightning bolt.
The rebel army fights in a Turkish crescent formation.

thetically multi-faceted works of art, with their own special linguistic sparkle’. At the same time he has proved a passionate advocate of their consistent translation into contemporary and lively Dutch and English.

Meanwhile, more traditional Vondel studies have not fallen silent. Recent years have seen, for example, an edition of six plays in modern spelling and with ample notes in a classic series that has since folded (Delta) and a new not particularly searching biography by Piet Calis. In the as yet incomplete large-scale eight-volume Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur the volume on the 17th century places great emphasis on the way in which Vondel's work functioned in the literary life and society of his time, and the focus extends to other countries also.

Evaluating Vondel in a European context for a foreign audience, is in any case no easy task. Vondel is in an unfavourable situation. His work originates from a relatively small language area. Even in his own day, with the exception of Germany his work had a low international profile. Only later did it reach other language areas (French, English, Russian), in fragmentary form and not always in particularly impressive versions. Other frequently heard explanations for the scant international interest in Vondel maintain that major sections of his work present worlds that no longer strike a chord with most people, such as that of the opulent, self-assured Catholic baroque. Another argument is that the (mainly Biblical) tragedies, written in a brilliant classicist

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style, when compared with those of Shakespeare or Racine in which compelling passion and its effects are central, often give the impression of being laborious intellectual constructs. While they treat problems of conscience with great moral and religious intensity, it is felt that they lack theatricality. Their enduring appeal, so their critics maintain, resides mainly in their lyrical content. For this monologues, descriptions of catastrophes and especially the choruses do deserve a place in the European canon. It looks as if a revival in Vondel studies will give further depth and substance to this vision. At any rate, the publishers Brill of Leiden brought out a new English-language volume of studies on Vondel's drama in 2011 (see reading list).

Living for ‘Poesy’

Joost van den Vondel was born in Cologne on 17 November 1587 into an Anabaptist family that had fled from Antwerp and in 1595 was also forced to leave its new home on the Rhine. In 1597, after moving from place to place in Germany, the family settled in Amsterdam, where they ran a silk and stocking business, which from 1613 on was managed independently by the poet. His first poems date from 1605. As a devout Anabaptist Vondel is a member of the Chamber of Rhetoric for immigrants from Brabant, his own countrymen. Biblical piety and moral concern for the fatherland are the great themes of his didactic and erudite poetry.

In around the 1620s Vondel, an autodidact busily studying Latin and antiquity, fully embraces the humanist culture of the Amsterdam literary elite. Initially this volte-face is accompanied by a serious depresssion. As a moral guide for society he begins to speak out in passionate, mostly anonymous satires and invectives on the corrupt greed of church and state and the dangers of theocratic Calvinism. Central among these are works in which he takes the side of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the elderly chief government adviser, who in 1619 following a power-struggle with the stadholder Maurits van Nassau was sent to the scaffold by the latter under pressure from Calvinist fundamentalists. For Vondel this statesman symbolised peace and resistance to religious meddling in politics. Immediately after Maurits' death the key Senecan drama Palamedes (1625), which was interpreted as a political pamphlet, appeared, in which the ‘martyred hero’ Oldenbarneveldt appeared as a Greek commander falsely accused of treachery. Vondel avoided a potential death sentence from the Court of Holland when well-disposed Amsterdam patricians fined him and banned the play. Naturally the drama went through many editions in a very short time, and Vondel was to be eagerly read in this way on many occasions. Those combative years also see the appearance of the first great hymns, which in exalted or epic style accompany various brilliant facets of the Dutch Golden Age. One true heritage text is In Praise of Navigation (Het lof der zee-vaert, 1623): trade and shipping are the route to progress, provided they are employed in the service of peace in a society based on reason and mutual respect. Here Vondel is taking a stand against the violent monopolistic policies being pursued in Asia at that time by the Dutch East India Company and following the line set out by the lawyer Grotius in his treatise on the freedom of the seas.

In the 1630s Grotius, himself forced into exile as a victim of the hard-line Calvinists, becomes a literary and ideological beacon for Vondel: peace among

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Vondel died on 5 February 1679 at the age of ninety-one. The drawing by Philips de Koninck dates from shortly before his death (Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkbinet). The poet wrote his own epitaph: Here lies Vondel, his story's told, He has perished from the cold.

nations and restoration of the ancient universal and unified Christianity. Like a man possessed, the ambitious poet labours for a long time on a classical epic on Constantine, the first Christian emperor. The project ends in failure and the destruction of the copy. The loss of two children - one of them a son named Constantine after his hero - and his wife was commemorated in funerary poems that have become iconic in Dutch literature. He now turns his full attention on the theatre: in 1638 the Amsterdam Theatre opened with a production of Gysbreght, which provoked controversy because of its Roman Catholic setting.

In about 1640 the poet converts to Catholicism, which he makes no secret of. Witness the Roman Catholic martydom plays, including Maria Stuart - which again earned him a fine - and a didactic poem defending the Catholic eucharist (Altaergeheimenissen/ Secrets of the Altar, 1645); Grotius is annexed as a crypto-Catholic. However, Vondel's devotion to city and fatherland remains unshakable, with as its guiding light peace and freedom, including freedom of conscience. In 1653 the Dutch painters acclaim him as their Apollo. These are years of great creativity and high points in his dramatic production and philosophical reflection. Two years after his son, who had taken over the poet's none-too-flourishing business, went bankrupt in 1656, the city regents secured for the destitute Vondel a sinecure post with the official pawnbroker's office. The poet remained extremely active well into old age, and in the 1660s produced a further eight plays (including some of his best-known works), plus a translation of four Greek tragedies and two great didactic poems - averaging

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over 5,000 lines of verse per year. The high-quality poem Reflections on God and Religion (Bespiegelingen van Godt en Godsdienst, 1662), an inspired and well-thought-out synthesis of his theological thinking in no less than 7,352 lines, represents a high point here. In the first book the poet is unmistakably taking issue with the core views of Spinoza: the unity of God and nature and its necessary mathematical basis. Thanks to his private contacts Vondel was able to do this before the philosopher, whose views had become known to an intimate circle, had published a single word. The third book has often been called a masterly interpretation of the Christian view of creation.

Master of modern Biblical tragedy

Vondel's twenty-four original tragedies form a unique contribution to European drama in the seventeenth century, the age of drama par excellence. He is one of the great creators of modern Biblical tragedy - his life's ambition. Moreover, after translating Sophocles' Electra, from Brothers (Gebroeders, 1640) onwards his aim was to construct them in the Greek style. Brothers is a richly textured and emotional play based on the revenge of the Gibeonites (2 Sam 21), in which David is obliged, because of a previous crime of their father Saul, to order the execution of seven young men. Vondel concentrates mainly on the Sophoclean motif of postponed punishment, David's inner conflict about exacting the unnatural penalty and the pathetic complexity of conflicts within a family. The play made a great impression on audiences and remained in the repertoire of the Amsterdam Theatre for a considerable time. The tormented house of David was to function in a number of plays as the counterpart to the Greek Atrides. As regards the application of Greek-Aristotelian dramatic theory, with the preface to his Jeptha (1659) the Amsterdam playwright was ahead of the French Classicists. This drive to create a ‘modern’ tragedy based on a contemporary cultural and philosophical dramatic grammar produced Vondel's masterpieces, which have become classics of the genre.

He begins with a number of pious plays, constructed according to the principles of multiple Biblical interpretations, in which the poet shows himself mainly as a talented innovator in the indigenous rhetorical tradition. His vocation as a ‘modern’ tragedian really takes off after 1620 via a number of translations of Seneca. From 1640 on this vocation becomes an obsession, certainly after he has abandoned his ambition as a writer of epics. The result is a series of well-crafted plays that are never banal and which pay less attention to the prevailing fashion for spectacle, which gradually distances him from the Amsterdam stage. The stepping stones are easy to trace. Intensely Catholic martyrdom plays which are mainly the expression of a universal idea and in which the influence of Greek concepts is increasingly clearly felt are succeeded by dualistic dramas about savage confrontations between good and evil and end with plays in which the depiction of the peripeteia (the sudden reversal in fortune or circumstance) forms the basic principle. The final play in the series is Noah (Noach, 1667), an original synthesis of the ancient Christian drama of redemption and Greek tragedy. A further point: few European tragedians have commented on and justified their evolution as explicitly in extensive introductions. These ‘prose poetics’ - Vondel's preferred form of self-presentation - are among the most interesting meta-texts in seventeenth-century European

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dramatic literature, all the more so since they relate to plays that are very much part of the collective imagination of Western baroque: rebellious sons, humiliated and triumphant fathers, the self-affirmation of the individual, the fascination of pride and violence, conflicts between reason, passion, faith, authority and justice.

First and foremost comes Lucifer (1654), which depicts the fall of the rebel angels. Combined with the hierarchical splendour of the verse, the daring location - ‘The play is set in the heavens’ - gives this typical courtly and political drama extraordinary depth. The great conflicts of seventeenth-century government are given a truly cosmic resonance: the revolt against the notion of order, the clash between absolutism and feudal allegiance, humility and self-exaltation, the dangers of the destructive power of rhetoric. When after two performances Calvinist ministers had this heavenly decor removed from the theatre as a sacriligious provocation, the play went into seven editions within the year. Adam in Exile (Adam in ballingschap, 1664), forms part of this same heavenly cycle that Vondel calls ‘the tragedy of tragedies’, not only because it deals with the fall of the first human couple, but also because peripeteia occurs in it in prototypical form. Absolute happiness is juxtaposed with utter abasement. It is Vondel's most lyrical tragedy, full of lines on marital happiness that are both ecstatic and sensual. Not until the nineteenth century did it have its first performance.

Poet of the community

A fascinating section of Vondel's poetry comprises the hundreds of poems in every conceivable genre in which, as a city laureate avant la lettre he loyally celebrated or mercilessly lampooned the life of his home town of Amsterdam and the Republic. And few poets of the time followed European history so closely and so critically: the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, the Turkish threat, the British troubles. England plays a major role in Vondel's European poetry, and a translation of these ‘British’ poems would make a remarkable volume. They focus mainly on England's participation in the Dutch struggle for liberation, the arguments concerning Charles I and what Vondel considered his outrageous execution - contemporaries saw the protagonist of Lucifer as a portrait of Cromwell - the family ties between the Stuarts and the House of Orange, the restoration of the monarchy and of course the three wars fought by the Dutch against ‘seasick Albion’ with the Fire of London as a well-deserved punishment. And to think Vondel once promised Charles II an epic if he would take on the Turks....

Vondel's many poems on works of art and paintings are also increasingly appreciated. He had close friendships with many artists, and apart from that his whole oeuvre is thoroughly pictorial from the outset. Religious fantasies and descriptions of nature and the human face are often consciously couched in the jargon of the artist's studio. He presents a ground-breaking play like Brothers at length as a fictionalised painting by Rubens, undoubtedly his favourite artist, with whose work his verse is often compared. That too makes Vondel an eminent representative of the European baroque.